Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

While I generally agree, just differentiating the fines is not sufficient.

Small businesses in particular do not have staff or the capacity to to deal with a large amount of compliance overhead. The biggest help for small businesses (and large businesses alike) would probably be if the GDPR would be less vague on the rules surrounding typically collected data

I agree in theory but in practise, this just results in even more regulations. There are very few or no real world examples of stricter regulations being written in clearer terms. The reasons are numerous, but a big one is that people often have a financial incentive to circumvent these regulations. They attack the edge cases and the ambiguity between each word. If the regulations are not written sufficiently prescriptively, courts are swamped with cases and eventually a precedent is set which nullifies much or most of the intended purpose of the regulations. So regulators go to painstaking lengths to write clear and verbose regulations, but ensuring compliance with tens of thousands of pages of regulations are expensive, and this results in an economies of scale barrier for small businesses.

There are workarounds like exemptions for small businesses, but this creates all kinds of new issues like a regulatory ceiling, which results in enormous new costs on some arbitrary day for a business once it crosses some kind of user or revenue threshold. Ramp-ups are difficult or impossible to legislate in this context. Further, two or multi-tiered regulatory systems are highly inefficient and arguably unfair. They're very difficult for everyone to navigate. Generally speaking, from countless examples around the world, rules should apply to everyone.

Ultimately this means fewer regulations generally are good for startups - and larger businesses. But there are also social and consumer costs for this. There is no perfect balance to be found. Just competing ideological beliefs and positions.

Fingerprinting is actually covered by the regulations and needs to be "consented" to.

There are different regulations, but basically they are technology agnostic (a good thing). If you as a compnay want to use data that could theoretically be used as an identifyer for me, you need my consent. For any type of use. Except if it is absolutely necessary to provide the basic service. Or if we have a contractual relationship, but there are also protective rules in place to protect the customer.

Different regulations handle storing data (like cookies, but also local/session storage and similar things on the devices of your users. But those are separate from GDPR.

GDPR is - as said - only concerned with data that could be theoretically linked to me as an individual. Regardless what this data is. Could be an id in a cookie, could be a fingerprint, could be smoke signals. It could even be the combination of different data points, that taken together allow for an identification.

Theoretical example: Imagine I live in a village with 500 people. The company tracks the location and that I am male (so roughtly 50% of the population), that I am between 45 - 50 (say about 10% of the population), have multiple cats (say maybe only three people now in that village, use a Linux based machine - bingo: You found me. And now you have a set of data that falls under the GDPR. Welcome in having to ensure you only use this data in a way that I gave consent to.

See: The law doesn't even just look at marketing or tracking data. Or what happens in an app or a browser. It covers all data that is either pointing ti me as an "ID" - like a cookie ID, or at personal identifiable data - like bei combination in my example.

That depends, are the people who are negatively impacted aware, and able to do anything about it?

There are some "mosquito" businesses that imho provide no net value and we'd be better off if they didn't exist (c.f. Bastiat's window breaker⁰). For example; payday loans, gadget insurance, MLMs, f2p games. The trouble is that there is an apparent need they're meeting, and nobody wants to "destroy jobs" or even worry too hard about exploiting the vulnerable.

Even if I were emperor and believed hese businesses were unjustifiably bad, I'd be worried about the authoritarian consequences of shutting down the less egregious ones. I'd also hope to have the humility to entertain the idea that I don't understand their full benefits.

In conclusion I think it's bad to have unethical businesses, and that even if they make the indicator go up, they are probably a net negative on the economy and society. However, I don't know what's to be done about it.

⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

There are a bunch of sites that stop working if you tweak privacy related settings. Twitter straight up tells you that if you experience problems, you should disable Firefox's tracking protection.